Why didn't I listen to my teachers?

The empiricism of life is something that has always surprised me. We grow up, and if we are blessed, we get to go to school. We spend hours and hours in class, learning what we need to know from teachers. Then we go home and we study, and then come back and take a test. We cycle through this process over and over in our lives, in an incredible array of subjects. English, Math, History, Biology, and on and on. We have example after example of learning something vital from a teacher, something we will use to build on and go forward in life, to learn and practice bigger and better things. Our success depends on how well we get through this process of "learning from others."

But what happens if nobody teaches you about life? Or what if they teach you the wrong things? What if the society rejects "instruction" in life? What if society says, it's okay to learn "school stuff" in a "school" but you should really learn life by trial and error? What if the society has abdicated its role of life instruction in favor of a politically correct methodology of "freedom" and "letting people choose?"

And even if society doesn't do that, why can humans not generalize from success in the classroom, by learning from teachers, to success in life, by learning from "life teachers?" Why is life lived empirically? Why do so many people say, "if I knew then what I know now, it would have been different?" Is it because nobody is teaching, or is it because there is no way to learn life without living it. Can life be learned from a book? Can life be learned from a teacher?

As the writer of proverbs likens folly to a prostitute, and admonishes his readers to stay away from folly, will the person who stays away always know, to his core, that he did the right thing, or will he feel "cheated" somehow by never having gotten the experience that other people have had, who now carry scars, but have "wisdom" from the pain? Is there something necessary about experiencing life?

I grew up in this laissez-faire attitude, where if it feels good, do it, was the prevailing cultural norm. Accountability has always been a "bad word" in this society. We can't hold poor people accountable for being poor, because they come from a bad environment, and never got the education to rise above it. That's probably true, and I am not doubting that whatsoever. We can't hold evil people accountable for being "evil" unless they commit a crime, because, well, maybe they were raised horribly and have no differentiation between right and wrong, so they can't know any better. I've had to deal with that personally, and learn to forgive for that exact reason, just as other people have had to forgive my wrongdoing for the exact same reason. But why did any of that pain have to happen? Accountability, since it cannot be enforced, must be learned by empirical methods, so that the only person learning the lesson is the person doing the deed. Accountability is not "taught" in this morally vague, politically correct world, it is only "experienced."

And in this world, the teachers are all gone. When accountability and morality cannot be taught, then nobody can teach it.

So who teaches it? In the setting of a codification of beliefs, then those who have a similar set of interpretative skills come together to teach the codified set. Raised outside of church, I have no framework to understand these things, and through 45 years of blind alleys, painful decisions, and hurtful acts, I am, once again, alone. It's just me and my faith.

And, that's enough. It's really all anyone truly has. As Jesus said, faith, even as small as a mustard seed, is enough.

Rather than be self-pitying, I am very thankful for the struggles. Empirically, I know, given every horrible mistake I have made, that faith is all there is. But there is a part of me that wishes I was not so scarred. I know I wish I had not hurt others by my mistakes, even my most recent ones, and the ones I know I will make in the future. It's a painful way to learn something that would have been better taught. I hope people have more sense as the culture moves forward.